The Master Sniper (40 page)
Authors: Stephen Hunter
A stone outcrop loomed ahead. Leets paused as he came to it. It looked dangerous. He peeped over it, upward. Nothing. Go on, go on.
He was almost over, slithering, straining his right leg to purchase another few inches.
Here I am, a fat man perched on a rock in a neutral country, so scared I can hardly see.
He had the inches and then he didn’t; for the leg, pushed to its limit, finally went, as Leets all along knew
it must. One of the last pieces of German steel that neither doctors nor leakage had been able to dislodge ticked a nerve. The fat man fell, as pain spasmed through him. He thought of it as blue, like electricity, and he corkscrewed out of balance, biting the scream, but then he felt himself clawing at the air as he tumbled backward.
He twisted as he fell and hit on his shoulder, mind filling with a spray of light and confusion. His mouth tasted dust. He rolled frantically, groping for his weapon, which was somewhere else, flung far in the panic of his fall.
He saw it and he saw Repp.
The sniper was 200 meters up, calm as a statue.
He’d never make the gun.
Leets pulled his feet under him, to dive for the Thompson.
Repp shot him and then had no curiosity. He didn’t care about the American. He knew he was dead and that made him uninteresting.
He set the rifle down, peeled the pack off his back.
His shoulder ached like hell, but seemed to sing in the freedom of release. He was surprised to notice that he was shaking. He wanted to laugh or cry. It had seemed seconds between first shot and last; clearly it had been minutes.
It had been extremely close. Big fellow, coming on like a bull. You and I, we spun the
draydel
, friend. I won. You lost. But so close, so close. That bullet that spattered on the rock near his head, what, an inch or so away? He shivered at the thought. He touched the
wound. The blood had dried into a scab. He rubbed it gently.
He wished he had a cigarette, but he didn’t so that was that.
The chocolate.
The driver had given him a piece of chocolate.
Suddenly his whole survival seemed a question of finding it. His fingers prowled through pouches and pockets and at last closed on something small and hard. He removed it: the green foil blinked in the sun. Funny, you could go through all kinds of things, running, climbing, shooting, and here would be a perfect little square of green foil, oblivious, unaffected. He unwrapped it.
Delicious.
Repp at once began to feel better. He had settled down and was again under control. He did not feel good that Nibelungen had failed but some things simply weren’t to be.
He
hadn’t failed; his skills hadn’t fumbled at a crucial moment.
And pleasures were available: he’d been magnificent in the fight, considering how hard he’d pressed to make the shooting position, the long sleepless night that followed. For a short action, it had been enormously intense.
Repp noticed for the first time where he was. Around him, the Alps rose in tribute to him. Solemn, awesome, like old men, their faces aged with snow, they seemed especially grave in their silence. Far below, the valley looked soft and green.
He realized suddenly he had a future to face. It frightened him a little. And yet he had a Swiss passport,
he had money, he had Vampir. There were things one could do with all three.
Smiling, Repp stood. His last duty was now to return. He pulled the pack again onto his back. It did not hurt nearly so much now. Thank God for Hans the Kike and his last ten kilos. He swung the rifle over his shoulder.
He pushed on for several minutes through the forest, not unaware of the beauty and serenity around him. After a time he came out of the trees into a high Alpine meadow, several dozen acres of grassland. The grass rolled shadowless in the sun.
Above, clouds lapped and burled against diamond blue, hard and pure. The sun was a cleansing flare. A cool wind pressed against his face.
Repp walked across the meadow. He took off his scrunched
feldgrau
cap and rubbed a sleeve absently across his forehead, where it felt a prickle of heat.
He walked on, coming at last to the end of the meadow. Here the grass bulked up into a ridge before yielding again to the trees. The ridge stood like a low wall before him, unruly with thistle and bracken and even a few yellow wild flowers.
He turned back to the field. It was empty and clean. It was so clean. It had been scoured clean and pure. It looked wonderful to him. A vision of paradise. Its grass stirred in the breeze.
This is where the war ends for me, he thought.
He knew he had a few more kilometers of virgin pine; then he’d be up top for a long, flat walk; then finally, that last plunge through the gloomy newer trees.
It was only a matter of hours.
Repp turned back to his route and started to trudge
up the ridge. More yellow buds—dozens, hundreds—opened their faces to him. He paused again, dazzled. They seemed to pick the light out of the air and throw it back at him in a burst of burning energy. The day stalled, calm and private. Each mote of dust, each fleck of pollen, each particle of life seemed to freeze in the bright air. The sky screamed blue, its mounting cumulus fat and oily white. Repp felt giddy in the beauty of it. He seemed to hear a musical chord, lustrous, rich, held, held, ever so long.
Strange energies had been released; they bobbed and sprang and coiled about him, invisible. He felt transfigured. He felt connected with the order of the cosmos. He turned to the sun which lay above the ridge and from its pulsing glare he sought confirmation, and when two figures rose above him, on the crest line, drenched in light, he took it at first for the benediction he’d demanded.
He could not see them clearly.
He blocked the sun with one hand.
The big one looked at him gravely and the boy had no expression on his pretty face at all. Their machine pistols were level.
Repp opened his mouth to speak, but the big one cut him off.
“Herr Repp,” he explained in a mild voice,
“du hast das Ziel nicht getroffen,”
using the familiar
du
form as though addressing an old and dear friend, “you missed.”
Repp saw that he was in the pit at last.
They shot him down.
* * *
Roger edged down the ridge, changing magazines as he went. The German lay face up, eyes black. He’d been opened up badly in the crossfire. Blood everywhere. He was an anatomy lesson. Still, Roger crouched and touched the muzzle of his tommy gun gently as a kiss against the skull and jackhammered a five-round burst into it, blowing it apart.
“That’s enough, for Christ’s sake,” Leets called from the ridge.
Roger rose, spattered with blood and tissue.
Leets came tiredly down the slope and over to the body.
“Congratulations,” said Roger. “You get both ears and the tail.”
Leets bent and heaved the body to its belly. He pried the rifle off the shoulder, working the sling down the arm, at the same time being careful not to break the cord to the power pack.
“Here it is,” he said.
“Bravo,” said Roger.
Leets pulled out the receiver lockpin and the trigger housing pin. Taking the butt off and holding the action open, he held the barrel up to the sun and looked through it.
“See any naked girls?” Roger asked.
“All I see is dirt. It’s a mess. All those rounds he ran through it. All that pure, greasy lead. Each one left its residue. The grooves jammed. It’s smooth as the inside of a shot glass in there.”
“Yeah, well, he nearly threaded my needle.”
“Must have been your imagination,” Leets said. “At the end the rounds were veering off crazily as they came
out the muzzle. No, the Vampire rifle was useless in the end. It amounted to nothing. A man with a flintlock would have had a better chance this morning.”
Roger was silent.
But something still nagged Leets. “One thing I can’t figure out. Why didn’t Vollmerhausen tell him? They were so good at the small stuff. The details. Why didn’t Vollmerhausen tell him?”
Roger knitted his features into what he imagined was an expression of puzzlement the equal of Leets’s. But he really didn’t give a damn and a more rewarding thought presently occurred to him.
“Hey!” he said in sudden glee. “Uh, Captain. Sir?”
“Yeah?”
“Hey, uh, I did okay, huh?”
“You did swell. You were a hero.” But he had other heroes in his mind at that second, dead ones. Shmuel the Jew and Tony Outhwaithe, Oxonian. Here was a moment they might have enjoyed. No, not really. Shmuel hated the violence; no joy in this for him. And Tony. Who ever knew about Tony? Susan? No, not Susan either. Susan would see only two beasts with the blood of a third all over them.
“Well, now,” said Roger, grinning, “you think I’ll get a medal?” He was supremely confident. “I mean it was kind of brave what I did, wasn’t it? It would be for my folks mainly.”
Leets said he’d think it over.
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from the
Stephen Hunter
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BLACK LIGHT
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Red didn’t like what came next. This business was tricky, and always involved the immutable law of unintended consequences, but thank God he’d thought ahead and had good people in place and it could be done neatly and professionally, with maximized chances of success. He thought his father would be proud, for this was an old Ray Bama trick: Avoid violence, avoid force, always negotiate. But when violence is unavoidable, strike fast, unexpectedly, and with total commitment and willpower.
He dialed a number. A man answered.
“Yeah?”
“Do you know who this is?”
“Yes sir.” The voice had a familiar Spanish accent to it, Cuban probably.
“The team is ready?”
“The guys are all in. It’s a good team. Steady guys. Been around. Solid, tough, know their stuff. Some are—”
“I don’t want names or details. But it has to be done. You do it. I’ll get you the intelligence, the routes, and you clear everything through this number. When you’re ready to move, you let me know. I’ll want a look at the plan, I’ll want on-site reports. No slip-ups. You’re being paid too much, all of you, for slip-ups.”
“There won’t be no slip-ups,” the man said.
The man on the other end of the phone, in a farmhouse just outside of Greenwood in far Sebastian County, let the dial tone come up and then he consulted a card and began to dial pager numbers.
Nine pagers rang. Two, one right after another, went off at the Blood, Sweat and Tears Gymnasium on Griffin Park Road
in Fort Smith, where two immense men with necks the size of lampshades were hoisting what appeared to be tons of dead weight at separate Nautilus stations. Each was olive in skin tone, with glistening black hair and dark, deep, watchful eyes, identical even to the tattoos that festooned their gigantic arms, though one had a crescent of puckered, bruise-purple scar tissue that ran halfway around his neck, evidence of some grotesque encounter about which it would probably be better not to ask. They had bodies of truly immense mass, not the beautifully proportioned, narcissistic sculptured flesh of bodybuilders but the huge, densely muscled bodies of men who needed strength professionally, like interior linemen or New Orleans mob drug enforcers and hit men.
Another pager rang in the back room of a crib just across the state line in Sequoyah County, Oklahoma, where a sleek black man was enjoying an act of oral sex being performed on him by a blond-haired woman of about thirty. He knew that she was really a man, but he didn’t really care; a mouth was a mouth.
Another pager buzzed on the firing line at the On-Target Indoor Firearms Range over in Van Buren, as its owner stood with a customized Para-Ordnance P16 in .40 S&W, calm and steady as a rock, blowing an ever-widening tattery hole in the head of a B-27 silhouette hanging from a pulley-mounted wire twenty-five yards out. He finished the sixteen-round clip, pulled in the target, and examined the orifice he’d opened. Then he smiled, returned the gun to its case, and checked out. In the parking lot he made a show of putting the case in the trunk, but adeptly slid the .40 into an Alessi inside-the-pants holster, after, of course, inserting a fresh sixteen-round clip and cocking and locking.
Other sites: Ben & Jackie’s Harley-Davidson shop, on 271 South, where a huge man in black leathers and the lush hair of a rock singer, drawn into a ponytail, contemplated a chromeplated extended muffler; the Central Mall Trio Theaters, on Rogers Avenue, where two rangy men who could have been ballplayers but weren’t sat watching an extremely violent and idiotic movie; Nick’s Chicken Shack on Route 71, where a large, pie-faced black man with a great many rings and necklaces ate a second extra-spicy breast, and finally at the Vietnam
Market on Rogers, where a snake-thin Asian, also with a ponytail and a webbing of tattoos that ran from his neck down one arm (and scared the hell out of the proprietors) was trying to decide between diced mushroom and dried asparagus for the three-color vegetable salad he was contemplating for that night. He was a vegetarian.
The team leader, a Marisol Cuban with a gaudy career in Miami behind him, was named Jorge de la Rivera. He was an exceptionally handsome man and spoke in his vaguely Spanish accent to the assembled unit before him.
“We’re thinking mainly of going for the kill from cars. Not a drive-by, not this guy, but a set-up assault off a highway ambush, coordinated and choreographed, with good command and control. Three cars, a driver, two shooters in each car. Body armor. Lots of firepower up front. You want to go at this guy behind a fucking wall of nine millimeter.”
He waited. They were assembling their weapons, a selection of submachine guns stolen in a raid three weeks earlier from the New Orleans Metropolitan Police Property Room. He saw a couple of shorty M-16s, three MP-5s, one with a silencer, another with a laser sighting device, a Smith & Wesson M76 with a foot of silencer, and the rest that universal soldier of the drug wars, ugly and reliable as an old whore, the Israeli Uzi.
Those who had satisfied themselves with their weapons loaded ammunition into clips: Federal hardball, 115 grain, slick and gold for the subs; or Winchester ball .223 for the 16s.
“You been paid very very well. If you die, money goes to your families you got families, your girlfriends otherwise. You get caught, you get good lawyers. You do time, it’s good time, no hassle from screws or niggers or dirty white boys, depending on which color you are. Good time, smooth time.
“That’s ’cause you the best. Why do we need the best? ’Cause this fucking guy, he’s the best.”
He handed a photo around: It passed from shooter to shooter. It showed a thin man who might have been handsome if he hadn’t been so grim, leathery-faced, with thin eyes, squirrel shooter’s eyes.
“This guy was a big fucking hero in that little war they had over in fucking gook country.”
“Hey, Hor-hey, you not be talking about my country that way, man,” said the ponytailed Asian as he popped the bolt on a sixteen and it slammed shut.
“Hey, we can be friends, no? No bullshit. I’m telling you good, you listen. Nigger, spic, cowboy, motorcycle fuck, wops, slope, fucking southern whiteboy asskickers, we got to work together on this. We’re a fucking World War Two movie. We’re America, the melting pot. Nobody got no problem with nobody else, right, am I right? I know you guys have worked alone mainly or in small teams. If you want to go home in one piece, take it from Jorge, you do this my way.”
“I don’t like the gook shit.”
“Then take it out on this boy. He killed eighty-seven of you guys. That was back in ’72. They even got a nickname for him; they call him ‘Bob the Nailer,’ ’cause he nails you but good. You think he forget how? In 1992, bunch of fucking Salvadorian commandos, trained by Green Berets even, think they got his ass fried on the top of a little hill? He kills forty-four of ’em. He shoots down a fucking chopper. He sends them crying home to
mamacito
. This guy is good. They say he’s the best shot this great country ever produced. And when it gets all shitty brown in your underpants ’cause the lead is flying, they say this guy just gets cooler and cooler until he’s ice. Ain’t no brown in his pants. His heart don’t even beat fast. Part fucking Indian, maybe, only Indians are like that.”
“He’s a old man,” said the lanky cowboy. “His time has passed. He ain’t as fast or as smart as he once was. I heard about him in the Corps, where they thought he was a god. He wasn’t no god. He was a man.”
“Were you in ’Nam?” asked Jorge.
“Desert Storm, man. Same fucking thing.”
“Yeah, well,” said Jorge, “whatever. Anyhow, we tie the whole thing together on secure cellulars. We move south this afternoon, as I say, three cars, three men in a car, and me, I’ll be in a pickup, I’ll hold the goddamned thing together while I’m talking to the boss. We know where he lives, but I don’t want to do it there. We hunt him on the roads. We move in hunter-killer teams. You get a sighting, we work the maps, we
plot his course, we pick him up. Very professional. Like we are the fucking FBI. We get him and his pal on a goddamned country road, and then it’s World War Three. We’ll show this
cabrone
something about shooting.”
Bob stopped talking.
A plane. That was it. The sound of an airplane engine, steady, not increasing in speed, just low enough and far enough away, almost a fly’s buzz.
“Go on,” said Russ.
“Just shut up,” Bob said.
“What is—”
“Don’t look around, don’t speed up, don’t slow down, you just stay very calm now,” Bob said.
He himself didn’t look around. Instead, he closed his eyes and listened, trying hard to isolate the airplane engine from the roar of his own truck, the buffeting of the wind, the vibrations of the road. In time, he had it.
Very slowly he turned his head, yawning languidly as he went along.
Off a mile on the right, a white twin-engine job, maybe a Cessna. Those babies went 240 miles per hour. Either there was a terrific head wind howling out of the east, or the pilot was hovering right at the stall speed to stay roughly parallel and in the same speed zone with the truck.
He glanced quickly out the window. The plane was turning lazily away.
“Everything okay? I mean, you tensed up there, now you’re relaxed. Everything’s okay, right?”
“Oh, every goddamn thing’s just super fine,” said Bob, yawning again, “except, of course, we are about to git ambushed.”
“Air to Alpha and Baker,” said Red, holding steady at 2,500 feet, running east, loafing again, dangerously near stall.
“Alpha here,” came a voice.
“What about Baker?”
“Oh, yeah, uh, I’m here too. I figured he said he was here, you’d know I was here.”
“Forget figuring. Tell me exactly what I ask you. Got that?”
“Yes sir,” said Baker contritely.
“Okay, I want you in pursuit. He’s about four miles ahead of you, traveling around fifty miles an hour. No Smokeys, no other traffic on the road. You go into maximum pursuit. But I am watching you and on my signal you drop down to fifty-five. I don’t want him seeing you move super fast, do you read?”
“Yes sir.”
“Then step on it, goddammit.”
“Yes sir.”
“You hang steady there, Mike and Charlie. No need you racing anywhere, they are coming to you. I see intercept in about four minutes. I’m going to let Alpha and Baker close in, then I’ll bring you and Baker into play, Mike? You read?”
“Yes sir.”
He looked back along the road and out of the distance watched as two large sedans roared along the highway at over one hundred miles an hour, trailing dust and closing fast with the much slower moving truck.
“Oh, I smell blood. I smell the kill. It’s looking very good. Alpha, I see you and your buddy closing. You just keep closing, you’re getting close, okay now, slow way down. Mike, you and Charlie now, okay, you start moving out, nice gentle pace, about fifty-five, we are two minutes away, I got you both in play.”
Someone inadvertently held a mike button down and Red heard strange things over the radio—some harsh, tense scraping and what sounded like someone systematically turning a television set on and off. Then he realized: That was the dry breathing of men about to go into a shooting war and they were cocking and locking their weapons for it.
Words poured out of Russ as if he’d lost control of them, and he could not control their tone: They sounded high, tinny, almost girlish.
“Should we stop?” he moaned. “Should we pull off and call the police? Is there a turnoff? Should we—”
“You just sit tight, don’t speed up, don’t slow down. We got two cars behind us. I bet we got some traffic ahead of us. And we got a plane off on the right coordinating it. We are about to get bounced and bounced hard.”
Russ saw Bob shimmy in the seat, but he could tell he was reaching to get something behind the seat without disturbing his upright profile. He looked into the rearview mirror and saw two cars appear from behind a bend in the road.
“Here’s the first and only rule,” said Bob steadily. “Cover, not concealment. I want you out of the truck with the front wheelwell and the engine block between you and them. Their rounds will tear right through the truck and get to you otherwise.”
Russ’s mind became a cascade of silvery bubbles; he fought to breathe. His heart weighed a ton and was banging out of control. There was no air.
“I can’t do it,” he said. “I’m so scared.”
“You’ll be all right,” Bob said calmly. “We’re in better shape than you think. They have men and they think they have surprise, but we’ve got the edge. The way out of this is the way out of any scrape: We hit ’em so hard so fast with so much stuff they wish they chose another line of work.”
Ahead, one and then a second vehicle emerged from the shimmery mirage. The first was another pickup, black and beat up, and behind it, keeping a steady rate fifty yards behind, another sedan. Russ checked the rearview: The two cars were drawing closer, but not speeding wildly. He made out four big profiles, sitting rigidly in the lead car.
“Don’t stare at ’em, boy,” said Bob as he overcame the last impediment and got free what he was pulling at. In his peripheral vision Russ saw that it was the Ruger Mini-14 and the paper bag. He pulled something compact from the bag; Russ realized it was the short .45 automatic, which he quickly stuffed into his belt on his right side, behind his kidney. He groped for something else.
Russ looked up. The truck drew nearer. It was less than a quarter of a mile away. It would be on them in seconds now.
“Where is it?” demanded Bob of himself harshly, fear large and raspy in his voice as he clawed through the bag. His fear terrified Russ more powerfully than the approaching vehicles.
What is he looking for?
Russ wondered desperately.
Red watched as his masterpiece unfolded beneath him with such solemn splendor. It was all in the timing and the timing
was exquisite. De la Rivera in the Mike truck, followed by the four men in Charlie, closed from the front at around forty miles per hour. Meanwhile, the Alpha and Baker vehicles, moving at the speed limit, steadily narrowed the distance between themselves and Swagger. They would be fifty or so yards behind him when de la Rivera hit Swagger’s truck and blew it off the road.
